An experiment method of maximum power point tracking for photovoltaic panel based on hardware in loop simulation

Abstract

Hardware-in-loop (HIL) is a technique that allows one to simulate the behavior of a technical system in real time. This makes it a valuable tool for controller validation in many fields including photovoltaic systems. This paper proposes an experiment solution for maximizing power of the photovoltaic (PV) panel using HIL simulation. The proposed HIL configuration consists of two parts. The first part includes the PV, the DC-DC boost converter and load are simulated using HYPERSIM and run on the real-time OPAL-RT simulator. The second part is the real MPPT controller based on the perturbation and observation (P&O) algorithm for maximum power point tracking (MPPT) using the TMS320F28379D board. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed HIL configuration, the paper also presents a software-in-loop (SIL) simulation configuration for MPPT including the PV, the boost converter, load and MPPT controller based on the P&O algorithm which are simulated using HYPERSIM and run on the real-time OPAL-RT simulator. The obtained results by the proposed HIL configuration are compared with those gained by the SIL configuration on the A10J-S72-175 PV module under different irradiance and temperature levels. The obtained results show that the proposed HIL configuration can be used to perform MPPT experiments for PV under different environmental conditions. In addition, the compared results show that the proposed HIL configuration fulfills its usefulness for evaluating the practical MPPT controllers.